Creating McKnight, Perth & Daire

Before I began creating McKnight, Perth & Daire I was going through a Ghost Whisperer and Long Island Medium phase mainly due to the traumatic experience of watching my father die.  I’m sure a shrink would just love to psychoanalyze that but at the time those shows helped me deal.  And from those shows I thought up Charlotte Perth.

At the time, however, the story was vastly different than the finished product.  When I first thought of Charlotte I had envisioned she lived in the Victorian era and was a woman ahead of her time.  Her benefactor would be a rich lord or mister and a ghost would be her way to finding out certain facts or particulars to further the story along.

But in the early drafts Charlotte wasn't flowing the way I wanted her to flow, so I began to rethink her.  I came up with the concept of Otherworldly as a stand alone, but as I wrote I wound up introducing a character by the name of Nash McKnight and suddenly I had to rethink the plot again. 

It took me a week or so to come around to the idea of turning my M/F story into M/F/M in an organic way that wouldn’t sound contrived.. I decided to turn the love story into three books and book one would be with Jonas Daire, book two would be with Nash, and book three would be with both men coming to conclusion that they could survive a ménage relationship. 

The mysteries were something different.  I knew I had to resolve Charlotte’s near death experience in the third but for the first and second, I turned to a trusty idea advisor…the ID Channel.  Book two, Hereafter, is very loosely based off a murder mystery I saw on one of those programs. 

But the greatest influence I put into the stories were the back stories I’d already written (quite unintentional too!).  Jonas Daire has ties to The Song Bird while Charlotte’s long suffering brother-in-law Alastair is from The Scarlet Dove.  To give me a wide writer’s berth, I needed a fictional law enforcement to rival the FBI and so I borrowed Hawke Securities. 

Each book took me about two months to write and I had a ball giving Charlotte her sassy attitude.  While Otherworldly is a stand alone, there are one or two unresolved issues which continue through Hereafter and finally play out in Breathless. 

Happy reading!

Otherworldly (McKnight, Perth & Daire 1) Blurb:

Charlotte Perth is all about sass because her job reminds her all too well the limits of human life.  She’s clairvoyant but her gift is unique.  She can only summon murdered souls and interprets the visions they send her.  When she’s hired by a wealthy woman to determine the fate of her great nephew, little does Charlotte realize this is one ghost that refuses to cross over.

Detective Jonas Daire feels Charlotte is a fake, out to swindle money from his rich aunt.  When Charlotte proclaims the nephew is not only dead but has been murdered, Jonas feels especially disgusted at Charlotte’s “profession”.  But when his cousin’s body is discovered in the place that she said it would be, with detailed accounts of how he died, he places her under suspicion. 

Jonas and Charlotte work together to find the killer.  As the two grow closer together, another malevolent force won’t stop until the truth is buried…until Charlotte’s ghostly visions are her own.

**Available now www.bethdcarter.com